Happy CHRISTmas! Hopefully you are having success balancing the reason for the season (Jesus!) and the commercialized event that CHRISTmas has become. Just another reminder that Joy of the Lord (JOTL) will not be meeting CHRISTmas Eve which is tonight, 12/24/18, nor on New Year’s Eve which of course is 12/31/18. We will fire back up again on January 7, 2019, with our monthly business meeting at 6:30 and our special beginning of the year share about what God has been doing in the ministries of JOTL and the Clean and Sober in Christ Recovery Network.

If you are in recovery, I am grateful you lived long enough to get to the rooms of life change, and that you are hanging with your new ‘family’ members in some capacity. I hear often from fellow travelers along the ‘road to happy destiny’ struggling with the holidays, that memories of unpleasant holidays haunt them, and/or that they are lonely. Loneliness is not the way God intended for us to live, and it is devastating! Many are familiar with this mind set and we know that familiarity is comfortable. Praying from this end of the keyboard that you have the courage to ‘live your way into right thinking’ and to venture out and see what our Lord has in store for you.

I had a white light experience with Jesus on CHRISTmas night of ’89. It was a despair and loneliness that I never imagined a man could feel and I cried out to a God that I had no idea about. He answered me and I have been blessed ever since that nano-second of eternity to keep on walking through the doors that He has opened. First and foremost the doors to the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Last count there were 630 meetings a week in our valley of, and folks who must live a spiritual life are gathering there. Grab the seat you earned, be blessed and be a blessing!

May God’s richest blessing, the sense of His presence, be yours as you participate in the hope that the incarnation of our Lord brings… year after year after year! What a great idea CHRISTmas is – praise Him!

Because of Jesus… Don Zonic